PEP 762 – REPL-acing the default REPL

I don't see the point. People who want Jupyter or an IDE know where to find it. Other people who want the basic REPL and mostly use editors anyway are annoyed.

Well, perhaps the usual suspects can get another infoworld self-promotion article out of it.

There's a tremendous power with defaults and with "batteries included".

The same people removed distutils, which is why at my company we had to update several internal C-extensions.

In these decisions the only thing that matters is if Microsoft, Facebook, Bloomberg or one of their employees is pleased.

It looks like a lot of care went in to disclosing this and providing replacements. Can I ask what you were using it for?

https://peps.python.org/pep-0632/

Not the one you are asking, but NumPy literally converted to meson because of the deprecation. There was tons of pain for so many extensions.

This pain generates job security for the bigcorp employees and grief for anyone else.

Super helpful, thanks! The NumPy page on the migration has some details on the differences:

    > ... [Here] are the numpy.distutils features that are not present in setuptools:
      * Nested setup.py files
      * Fortran build support
      * BLAS/LAPACK library support (OpenBLAS, MKL, ATLAS, Netlib LAPACK/BLAS, BLIS, 64-bit ILP interface, etc.)
      * Support for a few other scientific libraries, like FFTW and UMFPACK
      * Better MinGW support
      * Per-compiler build flag customization (e.g. -O3 and SSE2 flags are default)
      * a simple user build config system, see site.cfg.example
      * SIMD intrinsics support
      * Support for the NumPy-specific .src templating format for .c/.h files

https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/distutils_status_migr...

I never did understand this. It appears that they were maintaining their own fork of distutils anyway (and if you open up a latest-version wheel today you should still see it included); so why did the standard library removal cause a problem?

Because the "fork" still relied on the presence of the included distutils.